Dr Brian Knight went to school in Letchworth Grammar School and was part of Churchill College’s pioneering state school sixth form visitor scheme in 1969. He came to visit the College for a weekend in the Lower Sixth form, to get a taste of university life, so it seemed a natural choice to apply here for his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences. After his third year, he took a follow-on year studying Computer Science. At the time, Computer Science did not exist as a 3-year undergraduate degree.
Ellie Vitanov applied to Churchill College during the Covid-19 pandemic, and lived in Bulgaria at the time, so in contrast had never been to Cambridge. She applied to Churchill College as she wanted to study Computer Science and liked its location. Having successfully achieved a First (at the time of filming she was still waiting for her results) she will be staying on at Churchill to complete a fourth year of study in Advanced Computer Science.
They met to compare experiences and explore how Churchill College and computer science has changed over the years. Read highlights below, or watch the full video of their conversation.
Choosing a College
Ellie: “How I chose Churchill was based on the map I saw where my lectures would be, and I kind of went, oh, this is the closest college to William Gates over there, but I assume your lectures weren’t there though.”
Brian: “No, they were right in the town centre in the tower that it’s Corn Exchange Street. It was part of the computer lab and the rest of it was inside the New Museum site.”
Ellie: “So I saw that they’d be there, and I thought, oh, I want a college that’s relatively close to lectures. Also, I wanted a college where there would be a few more computer scientists than just one or two. I wanted to think there’d be more people I could talk to and potentially study together with and just maybe be friends with, you know? Churchill College is the biggest college when it comes to Computer Science cohort size. There are eleven of us in my year.”
Brian: “What probably really clinched it for me was Churchill had a sixth form visitor scheme in those days. That meant I came for a weekend when I was in the Lower Sixth form, spent that whole weekend here, and had somebody looking after me and we cycled into town to lectures and did all sorts of things. So, this was the one college I knew something about… It was a very natural choice to apply here afterwards.”
Coming to Churchill
Ellie: “To be honest, I was a bit worried about the poshness of Cambridge, which was also a factor as to why I didn’t choose one of those central grandiose colleges. So, I thought it this would be a safer bet and people here have been lovely and welcoming. I’m really grateful for everyone here.
Studying has been intense as probably every degree is at Cambridge. But as I mentioned, it’s really nice having a cohort of people doing your subject because you can really lean on them and ask them for help. And people have been very helpful… You can ask people for help and they are more than happy to give you some pointers. I’ve had people sit down with me for hours trying to explain something to me and I’m grateful to my computer science friends for that as well.”
Brian: “I had a very easy introduction because I’d been here as a sixth form visitor… So, I knew my way around the College and I actually knew one or two people who’d been on the same weekend I had earlier.
The first few days, yes, my experience was exactly like yours. Everybody here is very friendly, very helpful and very welcoming. So, it was a delight living here. And of course, at Churchill you get to live in College on site. Whereas most colleges in town you don’t.
And the thing I particularly liked is the dining hall. You sit down in a random place and you’re sitting next to somebody you wouldn’t normally meet, and you find out something about their subject or they have a view on what you’re doing, you know, from a completely different angle.”
Studying Computer Science… then
Brian: “I actually left twice. I did my three years undergraduate course and I was very undecided whether to go the academic route or to go into industry. So, I left for a year and got a job down in Kent programming a large ICL mainframe. ICL was a big British computer company. And I realised that was a mistake after a while, so I applied to come back and do the one-year diploma in Computer Science. Which was more or less exactly the same as the third-year undergraduate course.”
Ellie: “You couldn’t do Computer Science in the first or second year, but you could do it for a third year or you could come back for postgrad?”
Brian: “That’s right. Yes. I came back for postgrad and that was a one-year course with lectures and you had to do a dissertation doing a project. Computing was strange then, it was perhaps more of a sociable subject, because the university had one mainframe; it was in the town centre. You had to go in the room next to where it was and punch out your punch cards, feed them in, and then your output would come out of a line printer and operators could store it in a little folder that was yours.
Ellie: “That’s crazy to think about because I feel like I don’t have to leave my room unless I want to.”
Brian: “It was good in a way, because there was a kind of community there, because there’d always be other people around. In the beginning you used punch cards and you wrote your programme, put it in on punch cards, and it sat in the queue. And it would run sometime later according to your priority… But by about 3:00 in the morning, of course, your queue is very short. When you put something in, it comes straight out. Normally you put your programme in and you get the results hours later. So that was a big incentive to check it quite carefully rather than just slide it in and see what happens, then do it again until it works. Sometimes you’d wait 12 hours and there was a semi-colon missing…”
Ellie: “That’s disappointing. Even right now when it happens, even if it comes back in 5 minutes, you’re still like, oh, that semi colon!”
Studying Computer Science… today
So, in first and second year you don’t have that much choice what you’re doing, you have to take all subjects and in the 1st year you do a shared Natural Sciences Maths module, which was the bane of my existence. That one course I found really hard, especially coming from a school where maybe I hadn’t covered what was expected in A levels. I felt tossed into the deep end with revision, which was stuff like integration, which for me was brand new, which is kind of crazy thinking back that I struggled so much with something that was just an integral. I think that the pace at which everyone’s going is very hard to get used to at the very beginning. So even though looking back the course and first year were easy, from my perspective I struggled the most in first year.
One of my favorite parts so far has been third year because of the amount of choice. You only have to take about half the lecture courses that are available and you also get units of assessment, they call them modules now, which is some coursework. You have a project you need to do or if you take the theoretical one you have to solve some equations and explain some theories and send them in. But I did practical ones, so I did Natural Language Processing and federated learning which includes actually coding up some projects which was exciting. And I quite enjoyed having that variety and having that choice. I think that really benefited me because although I find all parts of Computer Science interesting, I am definitely better at some than others, and I think you’d find that’s true for most people.”
Why study Computer Science?
Brian “Well, computers are everywhere, and most people don’t understand how they work, but also as a subject, I think it does actually teach you to think, because you get so used to breaking down some problem into the steps, you’ve actually got to take, to make it, to solve it and that applies in general in everyday life as well.”
Ellie: “I think that’s another reason why I don’t know what I want to do yet, because you really can do anything with Computer Science. You can go into music, you can go into archaeology, you can just do programming, you can go into physics. It’s necessary everywhere and I think that’s really cool. It’s one of the things that did draw me to Computer Science initially was it doesn’t set you in a specific career path. If you have a hobby that you love, for example music and you feel like you do want a bit more of a practical approach to it, you can just study Computer Science and then go into music. You can go into any field that interests you.
I always thought that was a really, really cool thing. One of the things that I remember, I wrote in my personal statement was while hiking for example, because I really love hiking, I would find myself often wondering: what peak am I looking at? Where am I right now? Is it this peak or that peak? And I thought wouldn’t it be cool if I could just snap a photo and this algorithm could calculate based on my location and tell me what I’m looking at? So, you realise how often you pick up your phone and how much you use technology. You can create an app for anything nowadays, it’s so exciting. It does give you too much choice though. I feel like there are so many things I could do and I don’t know what to do.”
Brian: “I would say focus on something you’re interested in. Because it all flows from that. If you’re doing something you’re interested in, and you would do as a hobby anyway, then your work never really seems like work. And yeah, sure, I was lucky, I landed jobs doing things like that, but it’s probably still not too hard to get a job doing something that you really like doing rather than something somebody else wants you to do.”
Ellie: “Yeah, I think with Computer Science you can definitely decide to do it anywhere in the world, in any field.”
Career steps
Brian: “I stayed on for a PhD, which was on networking and a portable operating system over a network… and then I stayed on after that as a research assistant and did some lecturing. I did that for four years. And then I guess real life took over. You know, we were having our first daughter and my wife had to give up work. I went and worked at Acorn computers in Cambridge, from the BBC Micro Computer, you might have heard of, which was a very popular home computer, and it was actually rather a good one you could do a lot of things on it and have lots of interface that run quite fast.
I probably expected to work for a big company. That was what I thought I’d do. But in fact, that didn’t happen at all. I worked for a series of Cambridge startups mostly started by Hermann Hauser, who founded several Cambridge companies so after Acorn I joined the startup Active Book. Basically, we were trying to make an iPad, but we were 20 years too early and so the hardware wasn’t up to it.”
Certainly, it was very exciting and the early 90s there was a lot going … After that I came back and worked for another Cambridge start up, which had various names. It was best known as Virata and we made chips for ADSL modems and that’s probably one of things I’m most proud of. If you’d had a broadband Internet connection 20 years ago, it would have had one of our chips in it and some of my assembly language software.
And then the last job I had was with a company called Adder in Bar Hill that’s been going for decades, started by two brothers from Churchill. It’s never had venture capital or anything, it’s always been a private company, always made a profit. It makes video extenders, so if you don’t want to sit in the same room as your computer, you can have with an Adder box with a screen and a keyboard and mouse, and your computer is somewhere else on the network with another box next to it. And those are used all over the place; in recording studios, film studios, air traffic control, the Science Museum, and when you see Wimbledon on television, when they do the interviews out on the pitches.
But I had no plan. You know, it was just a natural progression of; work for a start up till it goes bankrupt and I was very lucky because Cambridge was a perfect place to be.”
Ellie “..that is one of the reasons why people do want to come to Cambridge because of the doors it opens for you and the connections you make and hopefully the career path that sets you on afterwards. The idea of Oxbridge was this mystical place that, oh, the moment I get in there, it’s smooth sailing. And although it does make it easier, you do have to put in the work.”
Brian: “The funny thing about Computer Science is a lot of people have taught themselves the important stuff. You know, you learn certain basics in lectures. Actually, a lot of what you learn is by doing things and getting them wrong and doing it again.”
Ellie: “That’s what they tell us, that they’re teaching us how to think and then we go and think for ourselves. As far as what I’m planning on doing, I am currently hoping when my exam results come back I have a First and I’ll stay on for what’s now called Part Three or the Masters. It’s an integrated Masters.
Last summer I did an internship in a big corporation, which is what I thought maybe I’d be interested in doing, but there’s thousands of people in this company, there’s no way you’ll know everyone’s name… So, it’s a very different dynamic to what I imagine the startup would be. But on the other hand, you have that job security at the end that they’re not going to go bankrupt. So, I think both do have their pros and cons, but I’m still not sure, and I’m not sure where.
And next year I think if I’m in Part Three, if you stay on you don’t even have exams and you don’t have lectures, it’s all coursework and a dissertation. So, if I am here next year, I’m looking forward to that. Just not focusing that much on memorizing things, but more working on things in programmes and getting a better feel for more of a career perspective of it, more of a practical part, because as crazy as it is three years in, I still don’t feel confident coding. I’m still not sure I know how to programme properly.”
Brian: “You never stop learning that.”
Ellie: “That’s true. You never do. But I feel like a lot of other universities focus on more of the industrial aspects and have you turning out project after project. For example, in my internship last year I was surrounded by people who just sat down and immediately started coding. I mean, I understand the theory behind it, but I’m not quite sure how to apply it because here in Cambridge they don’t focus that much on specific languages, I find they focus on general theoretical approach to how you do it, how you build a good project, how you build a good programme, how you make sure there’s no errors but I don’t really know any specific languages in depth when it comes to actually programming in them. And those are the things that you have to do on the side through projects or in internships. But it was something that made me feel self-conscious when I went to that internship and people just cracked into it immediately because they knew the language. They had worked in it before and I had to pick it up.
But the foundation that Cambridge gives makes it a lot easier to pick up new languages very quickly, so that’s why when someone asks me what programming languages I know, I always say I’ve dabbled a bit in all of them, but I can pick them up fast. I feel confident saying at this point if you need me to pick up a programming language, I will pick it up in a month at most.”
